A Nest in Words
by AGoodSpottoWrite
Summary: Beckett finally tells Castle what his books mean to her.


**In this story, you get to play a super fun round of 'Spot the **_**Harry Potter **_**Reference'. There's just the one, put there quite by accident as I edited.**

**Really minor and non graphic references to assault of a sexual nature. **

When her eyes flicker open to only the shaft of moonlight creeping through a crack in the curtains she knows immediately that he is not there. There's a coolness radiating from his side of the bed and an absence of pressure on her shoulders, around her waist. She cannot even feel the tickle of his breath on the back of her neck and she trembles in the chocking hold of the duvet without his there to still her. She rolls and sits in one movement and lands her toes on the cold floor. She stands like that and patters silently across the bedroom, as if aware of a sleeping dragon breathing fire with every snore.

She doesn't know where he is, but she does know what carried him from their bed. It's the only thing that has ever been able to take him from her side, to leave her cold and shivering instead of inside the all-encompassing comfort of his embrace: the thought of losing her.

So she creeps through the strange darkness of their home to prove that he hasn't.

She sees his silhouette hunched on the edge of the couch, his head hung forward and legs apart. His hair is a jungle splayed on the top of his head where his hands have torn through it. She can't see them, but she knows the day is engraved into his forehead and the sleepless night smudged beneath his eyes.

Finally, Kate lowers her heels to the ground and the boards creak beneath her. He looks up then, his face as haggard and worn as her father's and a jolt of terror judders through her heart. The last time she saw that written on someone's features she almost lost the last scrap of family she had.

"You shouldn't be up," he tells her eventually, returning his gaze to ringed stain on the coffee table, right beside the coaster he never uses.

"Neither should you," she retaliates, before she reclaims her place beside him.

He glares at her. "I mean it, Beckett. You should be resting." She winces at the bite in his voice that sounds too much like the shattering bottle of whiskey that hit the wall when she told her father she was going to be a police officer.

_You're going to kill yourself, Katie. _

She hadn't been able to bring herself to say, _so are you. _

She masks it with eyes rolled towards the ceiling, but doubts he sees. "I'm not going to break into an elite gymnastics routine, Castle. I can rest here." The silence that follows isn't triumphant. It makes her feel as if the darkness that surrounds them is coiling itself around her, creeping into every crevice of her heart. She feels it's going to swallow her until Castle's hand covers hers.

"I'm so sorry," he chokes, but she knows it's not the words that are strangling him.

She squeezes his hand back and murmurs that he has nothing to be sorry for, but she knows as the words escape her mouth that they constrict his heart instead of soothing it. Because it's true that if he had never poured Nikki Heat from his mind to the page, she would have been safe. It's true that if he'd been a little less graphic with the sex scenes she wouldn't have been a projection for a pervert's fantasies. If he'd never bragged about the tough ass cop he tailed, she would never have been connected to the name at all. But still she can't bring herself to blame him.

She especially can't bring herself to despise his words.

Even though it was her own nightmare wrenching away the promised peace of sleep before she felt his absence. Lips that weren't Castle's waking her up with a kiss. A voice without his softness tickling her ear, whispering words that weaved terror rather than calm through her heart. And the soft silk of ribbons stroking her wrists, binding her to the bed. With her head swimming in a haze of drugs she hadn't even been able to scream.

She'd drifted in an out of the nightmare, waking so often there was no need for Castle to shake her every few hours, and each time his hands had wandered further. It had been the reassurance of Castle's arms clasped around the waist each time her eyes snapped open to the haunting glow of the moonlight that had reminded her that she was safe; he had been stopped before he could touch her. Stopped with a butt of her head that had knocked him out cold and left her with slurred words on her lips when Castle had knocked down the door and cradled her in his arms.

But then she had woken again, the man that wasn't Castle had gone all the way, and her fiance's arms had not been there to tell her she was safe.

"I've been trying so hard to think of a way to fix this, but even if I took every copy off the shelves, I can't take the ones people have already bought. I can't take the words out of people's heads. I can't take back all the _stupid _things I said in interviews about you and Nikki Heat. It's all out there and these psychos are just going to keep coming after you."

The shape of his shoulder is a little thatch cottage in the heart of midnight, ice caked woods. Kate leans towards it but doesn't drop her head; she doesn't want to add any more weight.

"I'm a cop, Castle. It comes with the job."

"No!" he's on his feet now, his shadow towering above her unflinching figure. "Getting shot at comes with the job, talking down madmen with guns and threats from desperate families. _This," _he gestures wildly, as if the events are lined up in snapshots against the blackened couch, "does not. This comes with _me, _it comes with my writing. And there is something I can do about that."

The couch she is on turns to water, the floor beneath them becomes sand. She's slipping through them both, tumbling so fast she can't even draw a breath to scream goodbye and this time there are no hands to catch her before she hits the bottom and there will be none to scoop her from the pit when she does. Because this time they are the ones that pushed her.

"You can leave me," she says, her voice steady with a chip of ice. She is already retreating back into the safety of her walls.

She'll stay until morning to say goodbye to Martha, and Alexis.

The girl is nineteen.

She cannot bring herself to simply disappear from her life.

But instead of walking away, he's sinking back down beside her and tucking his fingers beneath her palm. "No," he corrects, "I can't." He pauses to draw a breath, ever the dramatist. "But I can stop writing."

A few crumbling flakes of rock form beneath her feet. An entire world without Castle's writing is second to hers without _him. _"No," she murmurs, barely breathing. His words wove life through her veins and now he wants to take it away. He wants to wrench the one life line that has been a constant in her life and hiss, _no more. _He wants to push her out of the nest she built in the round curve of an _o, _the end flick of an _a _and the swing of a _g. _

He has saved from herself with his words more times than he has pushed her out of the path of a bullet.

It's her turn to tell such a story.

"I first started reading your books a few weeks before my mother's murder, but after she died I couldn't stop. You wrote about the very thing I should have wanted to escape, but reading about it was comforting, because I could spend hours in someone else's life with the safety of knowing I would close the pages at the end of the day and the brutality would be over. The people in your stories lost someone in the same way I did, Derrick Storm was doing what I wished I could. Most of all, I read them because in those pages, I wasn't a freak and I wasn't alone.

"The characters in your books were my friends when I had no one, I couldn't dredge up a smile in my own life, so I reveled in their victories instead. They weren't just a reason to pull myself out of bed in the morning, but a reason to _want _to."

She's glad for the darkness now because it's an excuse not to look at him. Everything feels safer in the light, except for splashing her soul into his lap. Perhaps because, if the blackness veils the damage, she can convince herself he will not look at her any differently when the sun burns through the kitchen windows.

"Kate," he begins and already she knows he has not listened. "That was a long time ago, you-"

"No, Castle!" she stops, swallows hard and continues in a near whisper. "_Rick,_ your words have been my company ever since, even when my walls became so high I could barely crane to see the world outside. They were there when I became so buried in the case I lost myself, when I couldn't solve a murder in time to save a six year old girl, on every anniversary. When I was shot and I couldn't bring myself to speak to you, you were still there whenever I needed you."

It's strange how easily the confession pours from her after she's spent so many years holding it to her chest. Even when he chipped at her walls with a hammer, she tucked it beneath the rubble and prayed he would never clean up. But now there is a cause to tell him, the threat of no more of his tugging the words from her mouth.

"There where hours, Rick, days, when all the pain was gone because I was so lost in your world I forgot my own." Tears shine in her eyes, but they are invisible in the darkness and she swallows the rock from her throat. "On the day of my mother's first anniversary, I locked my bedroom door, threw the key out of the window and read instead of swallowing the pills in our medicine cabinet with my father's whiskey."

He's quiet for a long time, but it goes well in the moonlight and her heart does not pound as frantically in her mouth as it does when she spills herself by day. It helps that he's running the backs of his fingers up and down her bare arm, a silent whisper that she is still not too damaged for him to love. "What if next time you don't get away with a concussion? What if-" But he cannot complete that thought, and Kate begs a silent thanks. His pleading voiced breaks, but there's something far more _him _in the arms that tug her to his chest. "I couldn't live with your death, Kate, especially not if I was the cause."

She tucks her legs onto the couch so she can feel his heart beating against her and brushes the pad of her thumb over his lips to heal the crack in his voice. "Rick," she murmurs, the fringes of sleep finally tickling the corners of her mind, "if it wasn't for you I would have died fourteen years ago."

His arms crush her so tightly against his chest that she almost struggles to breath, but she is far from complaining. She feels safer than she has done in years, because he finally knows. He knows her last secret and although there are so many stories to keep him on hooks for the rest of their lives, there is nothing left to make him run from her. But far from snatching the path from beneath her feet, he is building it stronger, and adding another one under that, just in case.

His lips brush the crown of her head and she shivers, her fist curled around his shirt, anchoring herself to him. "Don't panic too much," he murmurs, "with my muse around so much, I could never stop altogether."

"What did I tell you about calling me your muse?" Beckett warns and Castle chuckles.

"Well luckily for me, you're on bed rest and I'm afraid breaking my legs would come under the heading of 'over exertion'." Secretly though, he is just thrilled that she is still there to threaten him.

"Only for the weekend."

The threat hangs in the silence between them and Kate closes her eyes against his chest, tuning in to the rhythmic beating of his heart to lull her into a finally peaceful sleep. Just as she is drifting on the fringes of consciousness, she feels a rumble and his voice breaks into the quiet.

"Hey, you weren't one of those crazies sending me death threats when I killed off Derek Storm were you?"

She smiles into his shirt and curls herself into him so he won't see. "I was all of them."

**Seriously, kudos to you if you got that reference, it was pretty obscure. **

**No one has to review, just getting as far as this author's note at least means I managed to keep a reader, but it is Christmas in five days and I feel that should influence your decision. **

**Happy Christmas :)**


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